The Second Thomas Hardy Annual

419 BOOK REVIEWS 1. THE SECOND THOMAS HARDY ANNUAL Norman Page, ed. Thomas Hardy Annual No. 2_. London: Macmillan ; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984. $36.00 The second Thomas Hardy Annual to appear from Macmillan under Norman Page's editorship offers an eclectic range of articles dealing with matters textual, critical, biographical , and bibliographical, providing further testimony, if any were needed, to the fact that the tide of Hardy scholarship is still at the full. The pressures of producing a yearly volume are obviously of a kind that makes qualitative consistency difficult, as has been the case with the very erratic Thomas Hardy Yearbooks from the Toucan Press, but this new collection has a sporadic vigor that helps to compensate for its, perhaps inevitable, arbitrariness of shape. The more general essays are also the more original. The volume opens with Simon Gatrell's speculations about the early stages of Hardy's creation of prose texts, with evidence drawn primarily from the short stories, Far From the Madding Crowd, and Jude. This probing towards a pattern for Hardy's movements from script to print has an authority that comes from an honestly declared tentativeness in conjunction with the impressive scholarship that always distinguishes Gatrell's textual work. Similarly, Arlene Jackson's "Photography as Style and Metaphor in the Art of Thomas Hardy" is a natural outgrowth from her earlier work on Hardy and illustration , and its originality encourages the hope that she has more substantial work in progress on the subject. The poetry fares well also, in Norman Arkans' detailed discussion "Hardy's Narrative Muse and the Ballad Connection," which is particularly useful on the developing relationship between narrator and story in Hardy's ballads. The essays that centre specifically on a single text are more problematic, and for an odd variety of reasons that may suggest the approximateness built into the assembling of a yearly collection. For example, it was presumably the unpredictability of submissions rather than conscious design that dictated the inclusion of two essays on The Woodlanders, in addition to a lengthy review of Dale Kramer's Clarendon edition. Frank Giordano, Jr.'s "The Martyrdom of Giles Winterborne" is identical with his "Giles Winterborne: The Intensity of his Contrition" which forms chapter eight of Giordano's recent book, "I'd Have My Life Unbe": Thomas Hardy's Self-Destructive Characters (University of Alabama, 420 1984). There seems little justification for the same essay's appearance between two different sets of hard covers in the same year. Glenn Irvin's "Structure and Tone in The Woodlanders " concerns itself with the relationship between comic structure and tragic tone, without genuinely confronting the generic questions that the approach raises. The novel's "archetypal comic structure" needs more than lip service paid to it if the question of relationship to tragic tone is to be seriously addressed, and it is rather late in the critical day to be bothering to note Hardy's tendency to "juxtapose tragic and comic elements" and to include "a Mephistophelian in his comedy." The overall conceptual and critical looseness of this essay is given uncomfortable final demonstration in an awkward invocation of authorial incentives to communal earnestness: "Hardy believes that we cannot live the life represented by Giles and Marty, however desirable it might be, but that we must go forward into a future represented by Fitzpiers, from which there is no escape." If that is the bullet Hardy wanted us all stoically to bite on, one wonders why he bothered to go on to write Tess and Jude—surely not to pack us manfully off into a future represented by Angel and Arabella? Peter Casagrande's essay centres not merely on a single text but on a single line, "The Fourteenth Line of 'In Tenebris, II.'" Casagrande's criticism is acute and blunt by turns. The use of specific texts to feed biographical speculation , which is then used to illuminate further the text, always risks being reductive, but that is a risk which usually sound Hardy critics have often been prepared to run (one thinks of the Bailey of The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary or the Southerington of Hardy's Vision...